Morse is back, baby! It’s pretty natural for me to be a Colin Dexter reader, because I’m such a huge fan of both Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dexter isn’t as good, but he’s still pretty damn good – he has the same attention to detail that the other two writers had, but he does occasionally slip into cliche. Still, with no more Conan Doyle to read and precious little Christie, I can’t help but love his work.

This book focuses on the murder of a deaf guy called Nicholas Quinn, who worked on the board of invigilators for the old-school O-level exam board. The interesting thing about his murder is that there’s no obvious motive, and it takes quite a while for the reader to get settled into the circumstances which led to his murder. Morse, meanwhile, is coming along in leaps and bounds, but he remains tight-lipped and so you have to guess what he’s thinking.

It’s a great read, and the plot really roars along as the pace picks up, and I love the way that the twists and turns are so closely related to the characters. Chance doesn’t really play a part here – everything’s meticulously planned and meticulously deduced.

And in what may be a world first, the fact that most of the characters felt fundamentally unlikeable to me didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the book. If anything, it just made me more determined to see that the culprit was brought to justice. The ending left me a little confused at times, but overall it made sense and I say yeah, read it.